Friday, 20 February 2009

LINQ to SQL - not quite dead yet...

I've happily gone on-record to say that in their current form, I believe that LINQ to SQL is a more useful tool that Entity Framework. Obviously, with the planned road-map to prioritise the latter (hopefully back-filling with the missing features that shipped with LINQ to SQL), this puts me on a back foot - so no doubt at some point (in the 4.0 era) I'll need to re-check my position.

However, I was very happy to get a "connect" e-mail today, telling me that they've fixed a bug I reported in LINQ to SQL, and that it would ship with 4.0; conclusive proof that it isn't completely side-lined, and continues to be a supported product (albeit with a reduced development effort). The only downside is that this makes it much harder to know when to make the switch... but I won't begrudge Microsoft that.

For now, at least, I breath the contented sigh of the developer who knows that their data-access works today and (in theory) tomorrow.